The first Friday of the month is “Jobs Day” in the United States, when employment numbers for the previous month are released by the Labor Department. A bit out of date for events moving quickly, the report—really for the first part of March when the data were collected—is that there was a net loss of 701,000 jobs. More recent information from the Labor Department, gathered in the last two weeks of March, was that 9.9 million people filed unemployment insurance claims.
Those are firm, real, and disturbing numbers. Perhaps you personally know someone tested
positive for the virus or even made sick by it.
I feel more confident that you know someone who has lost his job, or
whose business has closed, or one way or another is out of work.
Those people were not put out of work by the virus. Up to this point the virus has reached but a
small portion, some 240 thousand, of the 330 million Americans. Those 9.9 million job losses were caused by
government order and the fear spawned by government pronouncements and
predictions of what may yet happen.
This unemployment is actual, not a forecast. Each person of the 9.9 million has a very
real story to tell, and it is not a happy one.
Many are tragic. There are
careers that have been disrupted, some only just started and some now ended. There are businesses closed that will not reopen. There are painful ongoing worries for people
and families over what to do to cope. None
of us dismisses the sorrows involved with those who die, from whatever the
cause. I fear that the real, here and
now unemployment wounds are too flippantly disregarded.
At some point, reasonable questions will need to be
answered in a calm and deliberative way.
The actions taken and their consequences must be weighed, aside from
professed intentions. And the policies
of policymakers will need to be evaluated in light of what they in practice wrought. Among such questions might be these:
·
Did the realities of the Great Cessation—the
sudden orders to stop activity and association, the practicalities of work
lost, earnings gone, closed businesses, disrupted human interaction—caused by
government decree, do more harm than good?
·
How many of those lost jobs are coming
back? How many of them are
career-ending? How many businesses are
closed not to reopen?
·
Which actions ordered are unrelated to the
health emergency but rather take opportunistic advantage of public fear and
disruption?
·
What scars will remain on the body of our
freedoms?
No doubt you also have important questions, calling for some
explaining.
Involved officials might respond that the forecasts should
not be unnoticed in the review. Which
forecasts? Certainly good policymaking would
rely upon future expectations. Was a broad
picture evaluated of what might likely occur? How closely did policies applied align with appropriate
and realistic forecasts (taken together)?
Which forecasts turned out nearest to what indeed happened?
Shall we go to the current forecasts? Oxford Economics visualizes the loss of 27.9
million jobs in the U.S. The most recent
government estimates of U.S. virus deaths are between 100 thousand and 240
thousand. For the full picture, we
should include predictions of the fallout from prolonged social disruption and
human isolation. How much harm and how
many deaths might those policies cause?
When we tally up the score to see whether it all is worth it, include
all of that in the tally.
A deep recession caused by government order has never happened
in our history. Now it has and is part
of our story. Those who ordered it should,
with due deference and full fairness, be called upon to justify it.
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